


the slip that brought me to my knees

by deerhit



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Backstory, F/F, Jealousy, Magical Realism, Not Canon Compliant, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sibling Incest, Suicide Attempt, Underage Drinking, Underage Sex, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 07:52:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13700139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deerhit/pseuds/deerhit
Summary: Waverly may not be an Earp. She may in fact be something much more different entirely.(for the earpcest prompt: Waverly and religious imagery, backstory/pre-show)





	the slip that brought me to my knees

**Author's Note:**

  * For [krugerk (earpcin)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/earpcin/gifts).



> Please read the tags. trigger warnings for underaged sex, sibling incest, and a suicide attempt.
> 
> I also don't have a beta, so please excuse any careless errors or typos (if you let me know what they are I'd be over the moon to fix them and eternally grateful).
> 
> Big thank you to krugerk, who came up with the plot ideas and helped me out immensely (and if you haven't read vile. what are you even doing).

When Waverly is four, she goes to church. They all go to church. It’s Waverly’s earliest memory, the way her dress is both threadworn from being handed down and stiffly starched and itchy at the same time. How bored she is, shifting on the uncomfortable wooden pew and unable to see the altar above all the other heads in front of her. 

And Wynonna’s hand over Waverly’s, stilling her tapping. Sneaking her a lollipop that stains her teeth blue. Her mother was there too, but she’s gone formless in Waverly’s memory, barely the vaguest sense recollections, the flower of her perfume and the fabric of her dress in Waverly’s little fist. 

But she remembers Wynonna. Wynonna kneeling to do up Waverly’s buckle shoe, too big for her still. Wynonna smiling when Waverly stuck her tongue out, stained blue from the candy. 

Waverly’s whispered high-flute voice asking Wynonna what it means when the people all line up, when the priest touches them between their eyebrows. 

And her earliest memory, her first memory, forever memory: Wynonna’s lips against her forehead, a warm dry press of chapped lips and the scent of their shared toothpaste against her cheek. Her sticky sugar fingers in Wynonna’s all the way home.

+++

When their mother leaves, Wyatt smashes every plate in the kitchen. They eat pork n’ beans cold from the can, all three scrunched up together on one twin bed with the knit blankets around their ears. Willa glares a little at Waverly's feet on her bedspread but Wynonna tucks Waverly under her arm, against her side, and whispers that it’s _just like camping, Waves. Keep your hands over your ears and I’ll feed you. Just like camping, babygirl._

 

Waverly isn’t supposed to go out to the lake. Not in the warm months, because she hasn’t learned how to swim yet and the rocks are sharp on the bottoms of her feet. And double not supposed to in the winter, when the ice cracks and shifts under the sun, the water still moving beneath it. But Willa took her bear and threw it out, too far to reach with her little arms even when she lies flat on her belly, the snow chilling her through her coat and her fleece lined jeans, her toes hooked into the rocky shore, her hands stretched out, oversized hand-me-down mittens and the pinch of too small hand-me-down boots.

So she nudges herself out, inch by inch, staying on her belly, the cold creeping into her skin and starting to make her numb and tingly. She can hear the wind through the bare branches of the trees, blowing her hair around her face, and the distant twitter chatter of birds and animals that should be sleeping for the winter. 

And then: a hush through the last leaves left on the trees. A stillness across the ice. And a creak that starts soft and slow and rumbles before it roars, a boom like a gunshot, the crack in the ice starting across the lake from her and rocketing towards her faster than she can scoot backwards. She screams, hands coming up to block her face, but the bone deep shock of freezing water never comes. 

She cracks an eye open: just under the tip of her nose, the water ripples with her breath, the wind gone as fast as it came. Her breath fogs out white and thickly cloudy, the tips of her boots completely dry. And she floats there, arms outstretched, the ends of her hair just barely kissing the water.

She stands. Takes a single hesitant step, knees bent and arms out like she’s walking on the train tracks after school. Walks on water to get her bear and then all the way home.

+++

When Waverly is six, the bad men come. They come through the windows with red eyes and drag Willa away screaming. 

One of them grabs Wynonna by her hair, the back of her shirt, and starts to pull her away, her bare feet scrabbling bloody against the broken glass. Waverly is supposed to be hiding. Wynonna always told her, over and over, to climb in the little hole in her closet and shut the lights and the door and stay real quiet. She’s supposed to run up the stairs and close all the lights and climb in her closet with it’s weak half broke wooden slats and the worn shaggy strip of carpet that covers the hatchdoor.

But instead she’s standing on the rough hardwood floors in her footie pajamas, her hair in its sleep braid, eyes scrunched up as she screams in terror. But when she opens her eyes and sees: Wynonna leaving blood on the floor as she fights and loses; Wynonna being taken from her. And suddenly all her fear is gone in the face of her fury, that anyone would dare to try and part them. She screams her rage and the house shakes under her feet, the wall cracking from ceiling to foundation. _Not her_ she thinks. _Not Wynonna. She’s mine_.

When she opens her eyes Wynonna is free, scrambling across the floor towards Daddy’s gun. Waverly hears her blood rush in her ears, Willa’s fading scream, the crack of the bullet. When she walks to the porch she walks in Wynonna’s footsteps; Wynonna’s blood against the soles of her feet. The laughter of the demons as they run away; Daddy dead in the brown scrabbly grass. Willa gone and the smoke from the barrel, the gun dangling from Wynonna’s limp fingers. Wynonna’s blood between her toes.

+++

When Waverly is ten, Wynonna stops visiting her.

 

Waverly’s room at Curtis’s is bigger than the one she had at the homestead. Not by much, but the window is cleaner, faces the sun. Lets more light in. Her room is bright and big and airy and empty, her bookshelf too sparse without Wynonna’s hidden pack of smokes behind the dictionary, her bed too wide without Wynonna slipping under the duvet to soothe her bad dreams. Too airy without stale cigarettes on her windowsill and Wynonna’s shampoo on her pillow. 

“I want to visit her,” she says, every morning at breakfast. Every morning at breakfast she asks, demands, begs, and every morning Gus shoots Curtis that look and he winces. 

“Maybe tomorrow,” he says, and winces again as Gus’s look sharpens. 

Waverly scowls at her toast. “I want to visit her,” she whispers to her eggs. “I won’t forget.”

 

She sneaks out her window in the middle of the night. Holds her breath while she creaks the wooden frame up, the squeak of the hinges, frozen with one leg slung over the sill when she hears Gus moving around, the floorboards creaking, the hum of water through the pipes. But the lights flick out again and she hears the door to Gus’s bedroom shut and she carefully slides out into the tree, scaling it down to the ground quickly. 

Her knapsack on her back, the straps cinched tight. All the allowance she could scrounge up stuffed into her sock. And the handsized flashlight against her palm, the light bouncing on the concrete as she makes her way to where Wynonna’s been staying.

The run down house with cracked windows just outside the trainyard, with the loud dogs next door and the broken beer bottles in the driveway and the gravel road instead of paved, perfect for scooping up a fistful of tiny stones to fling at the attic window.

Wynonna comes out of the garage side door. “Stop that,” she hisses, gripping Waverly’s wrist tight and dragging her into the woods by the side of the road. She doesn’t stop dragging her until they’re well into the treeline, hidden and muffled away from the rest of the world. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“What the fuck is wrong with _you_ ,” Waverly snaps back, and dodges Wynonna’s swat for swearing. “You can’t just leave me.”

Wynonna drops her hold on Waverly’s wrist. She steps back, her arms folding across her chest, shifting from foot to foot. “Waves…”

“No,” Waverly says, tears springing to her eyes. “ _No_.”

Wynonna reaches for her. “Babygirl--”

Waverly steps back. “No!” She wipes furiously at her eyes. There’s a roadmap in her bag, ten cents spent to make a copy at the library. A route in felt tipped marker out of Purgatory forever, enough money in her sock for two bus tickets to anywhere but here. “No,” she says again, and steps back again. “You don’t get to leave me. I’m leaving you.”

“Waverly,” Wynonna calls out after her, but she doesn’t follow. 

Waverly runs all the way home, her sneakers on the pavement, the dim yellow of the streetlamps. Her heavy breathing, the tears on her cheeks. The way the map rips in her fingers before she throws it into the trash. 

+++

When Waverly is thirteen, Wynonna slits her wrists.

 

Waverly comes down for breakfast on a Wednesday and there’s no plates on the table. Gus and Curtis are half-standing, in the awkward position of people who were just sitting and can’t decide if they should get all of the way out of their chairs or sit back down. They look startled to see her. “Waverly,” Gus says, recovering awkwardly. “There’s… been an accident.”

“It’s your sister,” Curtis says, as gently as he can, and Waverly feels her knees give out.

 

Wynonna is very small in the hospital bed. Pale and waxy, sickly. Her hair is lanky, unwashed, knotted and mussed. And her left arm, bandaged from elbow to wrist, padded cuffs keeping both hands attached to the metal railing of the bed. 

Waverly visits her twice a day. In the morning, before school, and in the afternoon, just after. In the morning she opens the curtains and the window to let in the sun and the air, waters the flowers she brought that first time. Gently works a comb through Wynonna’s hair to keep it neat, gently rubs a washcloth over her face, around the hollows of her eyes and the gauntness of her cheeks. In the afternoon she reads her math problems to Wynonna out loud as she does them. 

“I know you’re awake,” she says, on the second day. 

Wynonna opens her eyes.

“I’m mad at you,” Waverly says.

Wynonna shrugs. “Get in line.”

“I believed you,” Waverly starts, but Wynonna bares her teeth, feral and frightened.

“Shut _up_ ,” she snarls, and Waverly flinches. Wynonna closes her eyes again. “Go away, Waverly. Go to your new home and her new family and leave me alone.”

 

On the fifth day, Waverly comes in the morning and doesn’t open the windows. She leaves the curtains closed and keeps the lights off. “I know you’re awake,” she says again, but Wynonna doesn’t open her eyes. “They’re sending you away again tomorrow.”

Wynonna’s breathing is soft, her face still. 

Waverly touches the inside of one elbow, the blue of Wynonna’s veins, the faint flutter of her blood under the skin. She traces down the gauze, thinner now than it was the first day she visited. She can feel the bump of the stitches through the bandage against her fingertip. 

“I know you’re awake,” she whispers.

Wynonna’s eyes flicker under their closed lids.

Slowly, carefully, Waverly eases the tape up. She unwinds the gauze, feeling the rough weave of the cloth against her fingers. And underneath, bared inch by inch, the ugly jagged black threaded stitches, knotted at each end to mark where Wynonna pressed the knife and tried to leave her, leave her again, leave her all alone. 

Waverly sets the gauze aside. She touches each knot, each stitch, each angry red painful mark. Gently flecks away the dried blood, dots of red under her nail. Pieces of Wynonna under her nail. 

She blows over the stitches, gently. And then, so gentle careful, her breath held, she drags her tongue from wrist to elbow. Once, twice, three times. The taste of ointment fading away and it’s just Wynonna on her tongue. On her exhale, all the hairs on Wynonna’s arm stand up. When she breathes in, she catches the end of a thread between her teeth.

She unravels it slowly, deliberately, and when it comes free it leaves behind unblemished skin. Unbroken, unscarred, pink and healthy. She stops with her cheek against Wynonna’s bicep, black suture thread pooled underneath her tongue. 

“I know you’re awake,” she whispers, but Wynonna doesn’t answer.

+++

When Waverly is sixteen, Champ asks her to prom. He asks her at lunchtime in the cafeteria, his hair slicked up with too much gel and sweating cheap cologne, a single white rose between his slippery palms, his boots shined but his shirt rumpled. She says yes, takes the rose. When they kiss her palms clasp against the stem, her wrists pressed together. A thorn pricks her, in the middle of her lifelines. Drips down her wrists, stains a single petal bloodred.

Her dress is sparkly and snug and she eats yogurt for lunch for a month but it’s worth it when she slips on her heels and walks on Champ’s arm and slow dances under the single dingy disco ball in the school gym, surrounded by cheap paper posters and cheap paper streamers, the balloons drooping by the last dance, the smell of gym socks and old sweat that never really goes away.

And his truck, shiny and new and definitely ahead of her in the queue of his affections, but she can’t be bitter about it with the radio turned up and the windows rolled down and the wind mussing her updo as they roar down the backroads, bouncing in their seats and her heels kicked off, her feet up on the dash.

(And how his seats go all the way back and how the flatbed is lined with sleeping bags and how the stars stretch out bright and endless and the moon hanging low and his mouth against her neck, his fingers between her legs. How sweet it is, her name rasped low and wet and wanting, how soft and rythmic the creaking of the truck is as they move. The hiss pop when he opens her beer for her, the possessive splay of his hand on her bare hip.)

 

Wynonna is sitting on her bed when she gets home. Waverly raises an eyebrow. “You’re lucky Gus and Curtis are out.”

“So’re you,” Wynonna responds. She pauses, taking Waverly in. “You smell like sweat and axe,” she says, something edging hard in her tone before she forces a smile. “Did you have a good time?”

Waverly shrugs, her heels dangling from two fingers, her hair in a tangle around her shoulders, falling in wisps from her clips. “Did you, at your prom?”

Wynonna shrugs. “Got kicked out at the door.”

Waverly moves towards the dresser, taking out her earrings. “They find the liquor in your bra?”

“And in my boots.”

Waverly snorts. “You gave it a good try.”

She hears her bedsprings creak as Wynonna stands. “You know me,” Wynonna says, coming closer, whiskey warm breath on the back of Waverly’s neck. “I know how to have a good time.”

“Sure,” Waverly agrees, wincing as a bobby pin sticks in her hair. 

Wynonna’s fingers bats her hands away, then slide through her hair, easing the clips away, massaging out the crunch of the hairspray, her fingernails gently scritching at Waverly’s scalp. “And does Champ? Know how to have a good time?”

Waverly hums, lazy and enjoying the attention. “Where have you been, anyway? I didn’t think you were even in town.”

“Here,” Wynonna says evasively, “and there. You didn’t answer my question.”

“He’s got a truck.”

“Oh?” Wynonna’s fingers tighten in Waverly’s hair, then relax again. “A big truck? A big truck to make up for something that’s not so big?”

Waverly opens her eyes. “Nothing to make up for,” she says, deliberately.

Wynonna goes still, crowded up against Waverly’s back, pinning Waverly’s hips to the edge of the dresser. “And you’d know, wouldn’t you?”

Waverly’s breath comes a little faster. “Maybe I would.”

Wynonna makes a noise in her throat. “Oh? Was it soft and romantic? Did he promise to love you until the end of time?”

Waverly swallows. She can still taste the beer on the inside of her teeth, the way it makes her brave and heady and daring. “Who said I asked him to?”

Wynonna is breathing hard now; Waverly can feel her chest rise and fall against her back. “So it wasn’t soft and romantic?” Her foot nudges between Waverly’s bare feet, the scrape of her boot against her skin as she pushes her feet apart. “Don’t tell me he bent you over the hood of his truck.”

Waverly shudders, her eyes fluttering. “So what?” she says, remembering being six and alone, seven and a lone, ten in the woods realizing Wynonna doesn’t miss her as bad as she misses Wynonna. “So what if he did?”

She feels Wynonna’s hand against the small of her back for just a second before it pushes her down, her arms flying up to brace herself against the dresser, sending baubles and jewelry and knick knacks tumbling to the floor. And then she’s bent over in her prom dress with the lube from Champ’s condom still dried between her thighs, braced on her own dressed on her elbows, her hair a snarled mess and her sister with one hand on her back, keeping her down, and the other gripping her hip. 

“Did you tell him you loved him?” Wynonna’s voice is half furious, half lost little girl in the deep dark woods. 

“No,” Waverly whispers, a confession into cheap wood. 

Wynonna’s fingers, trailing up the insides of Waverly’s thighs. “But he touched you like this.”

“Yes,” Waverly pants. Wynonna’s fingers, slimmer than Champ’s but cleverer, teasing touches against the silky crotch of her panties, bought at the mall while she and Chrissy giggled and modeled for each other in the dressing rooms. 

“I can feel you,” Wynonna says, shakier and quieter than she’s been all night. “Did you feel like this when he touched you? Were you wet like this?”

“No,” Waverly promises. “Never, Wynonna--”

“Sshh,” Wynonna says, draping herself across Waverly’s back, her dress rucked up around her hips, up on her tiptoes while Wynonna wedges a thigh between her legs to keep her in position. “Don’t--just--” She pulls Waverly’s panties aside and is two fingers deep before Waverly can ask her what she means. What she meant to say. 

So instead she moans, clenching up before she relaxes, shuddering uncontrollably until Wynonna mouths at her back through her dress, her bare shoulder blades, her teeth sunk into the back of Waverly’s neck until she goes limp. 

“Waverly,” Wynonna rasps, wet and thick and almost teary. “Baby--” Her fingers start to move, twisting and curling and thrusting just right, her thigh a slow grind of constant unrelenting pressure. 

Waverly’s cheek is pressed to the dresser top. She can smell the whiskey on Wynonna’s breath, taste Champ and cheap beer on her tongue. She can hear the creak of the floorboards, the harsh chop of their breathing. Smell herself wet and slick in the air, the window fogging. And beside her face, her palms limp. The drop of blood at the center of each lifeline, the sluggish drip of it to the floor.

She comes with a sob, her knees locking up, her vision whiting out.

When she comes to she’s in Wynonna’s lap on the bed. Wynonna is holding her hands, palm up, sticky tacky blood drying on both of their skin. “Does he know?” Wynonna asks in a murmur. “Do you?”

“Know what?” Waverly asks, her voice weak and wobbly. Her toes are still curled, her body tingly. 

Wynonna presses a fingertip to the bloody dots of Waverly’s palms, still faintly oozing. “What you are?”

“No,” Waverly says, her smallest voice, her weakest moment. She waits: for accusations, for demands, for revulsion. 

“Okay,” Wynonna says. She holds Waverly up when she stands, carefully eases the zip of Waverly’s dress down. Redresses her in a big soft t-shirt and tucks her under the blankets. Dusts off the teddy bear on the bookshelf and tucks it under Waverly’s chin. Plugs in Waverly’s cellphone. 

She kisses Waverly’s forehead before she leaves, between her eyebrows, and Waverly remembers being in church again. Remembers the cross high up on the wall. Remembers the nails through his palms.

On the nightstand, her phone buzzes. Champ says he loves her. 

_I love you too_ she sends back, and goes to sleep with the ghost of Wynonna’s touch on her body.

+++

When Waverly is eighteen, she almost faints during her high school graduation. She’s on stage when it happens. Walking across the stage in her wobbly heels and her gown and her cap and her painstakingly straightened hair, and suddenly her vision starts to tunnel and her knees start to go weak. She half trips, and the principal grips her wrist to stabilize her while he hands her the diploma. She gives him a weak smile and a quick nod and stumbles back to her chair. 

Chrissy leans forward from the row behind her, asking her if she’s okay. She says something about not having eaten breakfast and closes her eyes to breathe through the sudden pulsing headache thumping in her temples and behind her eyes.

She falls asleep in the car to her graduation dinner and is drowsy through it, trying to shake herself awake long enough to enjoy the fancy meal Gus and Curtis must have saved up to buy her. Definitely awake enough to thank them for the cards and the bills tucked inside.

 

She’s weak enough she cancels on the graduation party, turning her phone off after Champ’s fifth plea for her to come anyway. She waves off Gus and Curtis to their date night and crawls into bed.

 

And wakes, four hours later, because her window is sliding up, a figure climbing through. She groans. “I said _no_ Champ.”

“If your dog has problems taking orders, I hear there’s surgery that can fix it.”

Waverly sits up. “Wynonna?”

Wynonna shrugs, shifting on her feet in front of the still open window. “Or a shotgun. That could work too.”

Waverly smoothes her blankets, looking away from Wynonna’s face. “You’re back.”

“I am.” Wynonna digs in her jacket pocket. “I brought you…” she comes up with a handful of crumpled cash “... this.” She starts to put it on the dresser and stops, staring at it. She clears her throat and puts it on the bookshelf instead. “I had a card but I lost it.”

“Are you staying?”

Wynonna shrugs.

“Are you drunk?”

Wynonna smirks. 

Waverly sighs. She smiles despite herself. “You coulda come to the ceremony.”

“Not for me,” Wynonna says. “This whole town… I came to say goodbye, Waverly.”

Waverly flinces. “Oh.”

“But I also…” Wynonna takes a step towards her. “I was going to be at the ceremony. I was… finishing some business. Earlier. And it went south, it went really south.” Wynonna swallows. “And I thought I was going to die.”

Waverly jackknifes out of bed. “Are you okay?” She drags her hands down Wynonna’s shoulders, turns her roughly to check her for any signs of injury.

“What? No, I’m fine. That’s not the point.” Wynonna grips her shoulders, catches and holds her gaze. “I--I thought about you. I thought about…” Her hands find Waverly’s, turning them over. She presses her fingertip to the center of Waverly’s palms. “I thought about you. And… I was saved.” She kisses Waverly’s palms, then the tips of her fingers. Then she lets go like she’s been burned, stepping back a full four paces. “So I came to say goodbye.” She looks away. “And… I’m not coming back this time, Waves. Maybe not ever.”

Eight years ago, Waverly packed a bag and took all the money she had and dreamed of she and Wynonna running away together. She’s got probably about ten times that now, with her savings and her graduation gifts. And she knows what Wynonna feels like now, pressed against her. 

(And she knows something Wynonna doesn’t know. When the bad men came, when their family cracked apart and crumbled and broke, one of them looked right at Waverly, reached for her, stopped. Said _you’re not an Earp_ and tried to take Wynonna instead.)

“Okay,” she says, and Wynonna frowns, surprised by her seeming acceptance.

“About what happened,” she hedges. “About…” her eyes fall to the dresser. “I was drunk, I--I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” Waverly says, suddenly bold. She refuses to look away. Her palms itch. She’s walked on water and she’s fucked her sister and she’s not an Earp but she’s still stuck in Purgatory. 

Wynonna shrugs a shoulder. “I’ll call,” she says.

Waverly waits until the window has slid shut behind her. “You won’t,” she says, and then counts the years on her fingers, Wynonna’s twenty-ninth birthday. 

She can wait.

**Author's Note:**

> yes, some of my other earpcest fics used to be on another account. I just needed a little more compartilization of my fandom writing. thank you for your understanding.
> 
> let me know what you think in the comments :)


End file.
